As the shepherd of the ArchiMate standard, you are currently working on its next iteration. As I am not part of the ArchiMate Forum, I am going to send you a few open letters with suggestions for improvement of the language and what to do an not to do. I will be voicing some stern/harsh criticisms on ArchiMate in these letters, please don’t take it personal, I’m only interested in strengthening the language which I already find useful as it is. And I apologise beforehand for my language here and there.

This is the first of such a letter.

Today, I want to write to you about the Specialisation relation in ArchiMate.

A short one today. I have a view taken from a certain book. The view contains an error, can you spot it? And when you have spotted it, go to the ArchiMate 2.1 Specification and can you tell me what is wrong with it with respect to the same subject? Click the image below for a PDF:

Maybe there are more errors then the one I have in mind. In that case the author can really die from shame :-)

Update 18 June 2015: That was quick! The answers are in the comment section below. Now I can die from shame of making such an error. And those that maintain ArchiMate have some more food for thought about the failure of creating meaningful conclusions from a simple syntactical rule. ArchiMate 3 should overhaul the Derivation concept. Let’s just hope that they won’t “throw the baby away with the bath water” when creating ArchiMate 3. Making it even more formal (syntactical) will undermine that what makes ArchiMate so usable. And please: forget about backwards compatibility. It is overrated in this area.

Just a short mention here: I’ve just published a new column on the site of the Enterprise Architecture Professional Journal titled Reverse Cloud. It deals with the latency effect in networks (which is thoroughly explained in an aside) and describes a scenario how that could prompt a new Cloud pattern. It contains two ArchiMate pictures, which is why I am also mentioning it here. Mentioning it here is not 100% On Topic. I wonder do the subscribers to this blog mind? Comments welcome.

In the previous post, Reusable Infrastructure Modelling Patterns, I discussed the creation of reusable patterns to more effectively model large homogenous parts of the infrastructure landscape, or in other words: if you have 1000 identical RHEL servers, modelling the structure of each of these individually is not what you would like. The post contained a quiz with two questions. The answers and my proposed reusable pattern solution is given in this post. Warning: like the previous post this is not ‘beginner ArchiMate’. So if you’re new to the language, don’t get scared away by this complex story. Continue reading →

A while back, I wrote the post Modelling Homogenous Landscapes in #ArchiMate (Classes and Instances), which was a first post on modelling detailed infrastructure landscapes. Assuming you’re with me that a modelling language is very useful for large complex situations, but doesn’t add that much value to simple diagrams, we can delve deeper into modelling large infrastructural landscapes in enough detail so that useful analysis is possible. Continue reading →

Short update. For those who would like to discuss Enterprise Architecture with me in person: I will be presenting at the Gartner EA Summit London 2015 on May 20th 2015 in London UK and I will be giving the closing keynote (in Dutch) at the MBT Congres 2015 on May 21st 2015 in Houten NL.

The direction of arrow of the Used-By relation is a constant source of entertainment and/or frustration, see for instance this (started by Sol Kahn, 37 comments) and this LinkedIn discussion (started by Michiel Perdeck, 40 comments). As the latter discussion shows, the frustration with the direction of ArchiMate’s Used-By may remain, it is not always a passing problem for someone new to ArchiMate. Maybe the following helps in the discussions about Used-By. Continue reading →